The smartest person I know turned down a position as CEO of one of the largest companies in the world to become CEO of a smaller and more independent oriented competitor and is apparently loving their job.

In terms of developers, it's typically been the opposite. That the best developers I know had previously worked at larger firms, but don't anymore.

I suspect part of being smart in general comes with the realization that there's more to life than a job's status and salary, and prioritizing those other things is a wise thing to do. So having picked up competency at large companies when younger but moving away from them later on trends to correlate with the smarter people I know.

The smartest people I have personally worked with work for companies like Siemens, GE, etc. on very technical things that require an understanding of a broad range of tech combined with a lot of domain expertise, usually gained from at least some stint in academia. Usually money not so motivating as an interesting problem domain.

I've bounced around a few companies, and all the smartest people I know are in the semiconductor industry. Some of them - self-proclaimed hardware engineers - would write better code than what I've seen come out of lifelong software devs. They have crazy deep, specialised knowledge on so many fields it boggles the mind.

There's no real divide between startups and corporations in terms of talents from what I perceived. The industry was in general seething with talent.

Isn't the pay poor in the semiconductor industry?

the very smartest may not always seek the highest paying jobs.

it is at least true in sweden that the highest earners are not necessarily the smartest: https://fortune.com/2023/02/17/smartest-not-paid-most-wages-...

(i think this was on the front page recently)

This is my experience. Brilliant devs tend not to be primarily money-oriented. They are motivated by being able to do the things they're interested in doing.

Yeah if your job is extremely boring it can drag down your overall happiness despite more money

Gotta find a good balance

It can be, but the divide isn't as pronounced as it was in the late 90s and early 00s. I know that RTL engineers tend to make more than most software engineers nowadays.

My previous housemate worked in the tech recruitment industry, and he told me that the top end of the semiconductor industry tended to always pay better than the software industry, provided you excluded finance from the mix (where hardware engineers don't generally get a foot in outside of designing chips for HFT). Equally, though, the bottom of the scale was lower.

My personal experience supports that conclusion. As a graduate, my starting salary was dramatically lower than my university friends who went into software, but the jump in pay between grades proved to be much more dramatic.

I used to think that people at FAANGs are some of the smartest. That's the usual narrative anyways.

After working with a lot of them, I realize that they have a long tail of brilliant people (it's a good place to rest/vest and retire) but most of them are average cogs that are only good at grinding leetcode and average on everything else.

I have seen way smarter people in startups that will never accept to work at places like FAANGs.

FAANG has a high floor that many startups I've worked at don't have. Much less morons at FAANG than other places I've worked.

But they certainly don't have a monopoly on finding brilliant people either, while they have plenty, so do startups and bigcos and everything in between.

I guess it depends how we define "smart". To me, smart means getting things done and being able to see trade-offs and the bigger picture. Something that I have seen lacking in a lot of FAANGs employee that I worked with through open-source.

The open source communities I've been involved in had a really high density of smart and motivated people that saw trade offs, maybe higher than FAANG, so it's likely your bar is quite high.

I just mean, I've worked at startups where people could say, write a for loop, but didn't understand how threads or concurrency worked at all, or why you'd want to use a set vs a list etc.

At least FAANG is pretty good at filtering the latter type of folks.

Not at all. None of the smartest people I have known have worked for a FAANG company. Most of them haven't worked for startups, either.

They tend to work for companies that are on the forefront of whatever flavor of tech they are interested in, so they work for a variety of different kinds of companies.

The smartest software engineers I know work on open-source software.

The smartest PEOPLE I know aren't software engineers at all.

> The smartest PEOPLE I know aren't software engineers at all.

Inquiring minds want to know.

Mathematicians, writers... one is a preschool teacher, even. A few are bums.

It wouldn't be either, really. The smartest people I've worked with are usually not engineers at all. I started my career working on classified defense and intelligence projects and the research scientists driving new capabilities are still the only people I've ever encountered in any line of work doing things that I legitimately felt it would take me a decade to understand. Think for instance of everything Claude Shannon did while he was at Bell Labs.

Of the two, though, obviously larger companies are more likely to even be able to fund truly novel research compared to a startup. There's only so much you can do under the constraint that anything you build has to be a component of a usable product you can plausibly sell to a defined market in the next six months.

If we assume that 1% of the human population are potential geniuses, then at the moment, we have about 80 million potential geniuses on the planet. They are not always aware that they have this potential. Life and financial circumstances follow a standard distribution. Not every potential genius on Earth will receive the required education and a nurturing environment. You can assume there are more potential geniuses in India and China (simply by the numbers), and they do not always have the perfect conditions to cultivate their abilities. So, if you look around and pick 100 people, there is a chance that one of them is a genius or potential genius. Some of these individuals may be plumbers. They might have interests that are completely different from what you might expect of a smart person. Also, if you consider the number of people working in a company, you can estimate how many potential geniuses are among them. Although high-tech companies may have a higher concentration of such individuals, you cannot deny the high probability that a Mexican immigrant working at Amazon in their warehouse, packing your goods, could be a potential genius.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#:~:text=8.1%....

The higher your IQ the more likely you have the capabilities to remove yourself from bad circumstances. I'd wager it's very unlikely that if you reach adulthood and you're still working a minimum wage job, barring significant mental health issues or life circumstances, you secretly have a top 1% potential genius IQ.

If you look at some of the greatest figures of the 20th century, many of them pulled themselves from complete squalor and destitution on their talent/brains alone. So even back then there were means via which disadvantaged smart people could assert agency over their circumstances.

The poorest person with an internet access nowadays is far more empowered to take advantage of their prodigious intellect than anyone 30+ years ago.

There is an implicit bias in the assumption that high-IQ individuals should naturally seek high-profile or high-income jobs.

Life is diverse...

People who have the will to "pull themselves from complete squalor" do not necessarily need to be high IQ individuals. They need to be fighters. Though they will fail if they have an IQ bellow 85 (that what US Army already established).

There is a correlation between IQ and income, but there is no correlation between wealth and income′.

It may be an anecdotal oversimplification, but there are people with interests completely different from what you might find interesting in life, and there are recorded cases of individuals with high IQs working as bartenders. Some high-IQ individuals become criminals due to life circumstances. Some of them don't want to stand out and pursue whatever interests they have, while not caring about the things that most people find interesting. I personally know very intelligent person who are absolutely happy with stable and average jobs, which they consider routine and to which they devote little thought (and apparently time), while they dedicate their thoughts to the themes that interest them. They do this not for money or fame but simply because they find these themes peculiar.

At the same time, you should not forget that IQ is a number that indicates only your ability to find and solve patterns and potentially be more successful the higher your IQ. However, this potential may not necessarily be realized.

Moreover, this ability to solve patterns can be a trap; without discipline, you may tend to jump to conclusions based on very little evidence.

My point is, there is a potential genius you can meet every day if you count 100 people walking past you.

However, if you consider that "genius" level starts from an IQ of 140, then only 0.48% of the human population has this potential. So, you would need to count a little more than twice as many people walking past you.

[1] https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation...

Of course not every high IQ individual works a high-income job. However if there's some excessively harmful part of one's life, a high IQ person would be more naturally empowered to escape it. Even if they end up in a low-wage job, it's more likely to be voluntary if they're very smart. Without their high IQ they'd be somewhere they'd prefer not to be without much means of escape as they can't develop any cognitive skills worth paying a premium for.

I know a few who probably doesn’t realize how smart they actually are.

Smartest one I known so far works at a corp and is often moved between teams for new projects. Second smartest person I know works at a tiny startup and enjoys life and as chill as Buddha. The third smartest person I know doesn’t do tech anymore, was promoted to higher level management and left tech because he made immense f*ku money and is mostly travelling these days.

The smartest person I know who's in his 50's is now an alcoholic - made and lost a fortune. He's still worth an easy 20 million dollars, but is way too driven and edgy to just shut up and retire.

I read a thin line separates genius from madness.

His entire life has exemplified this.

It's profoundly sad to see him - his genius is a curse.

I've only personally known two people who were unambiguously geniuses, and they were both deeply broken people. If that's the price of genius, then I'm very happy being a subgenius.

> a thin line separates genius from madness.

I suspect that genius is actually a form of insanity, personally. A functional form, but still...

Exactly - that unrelenting focus, single-minded obsession. When it's creative and productive it leads to something beautiful. But the flip side is a horror show.

Of the smartest people I know, one became a university professor, one works at DeepMind, one at Amazon, two work at local small companies with comparatively low compensation but a healthy atmosphere and good work-life balance, and one left tech to do their own thing in the education field.

The smartest people I know work in government, education, and agriculture. Some in music and other arts. One at FAANG, but they might not be happy there.

Also depends on how you define smart. M-W dictionary says intelligent, which itself has many definitions. I'm currently biased towards considering healthspan, environmental health, and (related) health of society over the next millennia; what behaviors will help us humans know the story of life on earth more deeply and continuously? It's smart to consider the long-range narrative). For background, I only dabble in software development as a hobby and sometimes to make something for work (currently at a government entity for public infrastructure).

Absolutely, not. Each day, I constantly see evidences of passion theory of Lev Gumilev.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnogenesis

People critique him on non important parts of theory, but the main idea is excellent.

Idea is, few percents of people have from nature wish to change world, Gumilev named them passionaries.

And unfortunately, ONLY these people have ambitions, want to make money and searching some endeavor.

Passion is not totally unconnected to smartness, but if some person is smart, but without passion, he will not use his brain to grow. I seen huge number of smart people, who spent their talent to just avoid work.

So, what I want to say, if you see some person looking dude, this is not evidence, he could just imitate this, to more easy get joyful life.

And the second important thing - sometimes career of person powered by some his relative, or friend, or just some manipulating person, who constantly pushed him, and even more, this pushing person could be smarter than his object(S). (Yes, many pushing persons push on several persons, not on one person).

Sure, sometimes, people sacrifice their life, to help their relatives or loved, for example to got out from poverty, but I think, in Western countries you don't need to do such sacrifice, their social system and economy are good enough, so who don't want to be in poverty, will not be.

So short answer - now you would find smart person literally everywhere, you just need to figure out, he is smart.

By pure IQ: The smartest people I know very likely work in pure maths at universities.

pure maths folks at the highest level seem like organic compute machines that sleep

Rényi declared "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems."

I feel like all fields eventually become math when it gets hard

I think there's a bias to this question where someone thinks of a place they should be working and then names 5 people who work there. Or they pick a damn smart mentor who taught them 20 years ago or a celebrity who wrote a book and surprise, surprise they're still there. Heck, if I listed everyone with a PhD from Harvard, they'd be working in the same university.

So to be fair, I'll check the 5 people who I don't know what they're up to.

1. Petroleum engineer at a petroleum company.

2. Well engineer at a petroleum company.

3. Manager at a petroleum company.

4. Doctor in a well paid city.

5. Manager at the Ministry of Finance.

There's still a bias - all are from the same (expensive) university, so there's a bias towards scholarships or rich kids. All are mid 30s, Malaysian nationals who have lived for years outside their home country. I'm sure the results would be very different plus/minus a decade.

Seems like many in their 30s took a job, hated the job, did freelancing etc, ended up in the highest paying job they could find. One was a doctor who became a manager in a petroleum company.

I have not too many data points to add, but the 2nd smartest person I know joined Microsoft and left after 2 years to found a startup.

The smartest person I know left the industry after doing a few years of freelance work¹ earning heaps of money and bought a property for their family to settle somewhere remote.

¹ ABAP

Smart is so relative and so overrated. I learned a long time ago that the person you think might be the dumbest sad sack around probably has some niche in this world where they are king. And similarly the guy with the off-the-charts IQ is probably a moron in some part of their life. You wanna talk about smart? Be the person who is empathetic enough to figure out other people's strengths and weaknesses and how to work with them. As far as where to work - you'll meet smart people and dumb people everywhere you go, so figure out what you like doing and go there. Big Co works for some, startups for others - it isn't just about smarts, but also personality and risk profile.

The smartest people I knew in school didn't seem interested in regular web dev jobs (front end/back end), like that was too easy. A lot of them interned at FAANG doing that kind of stuff but didn't return.

The ones I know are now either at quant firms, doing PhDs in stuff like ML, or working but in some other niche area of software (for example graphics or robotics)

I've worked at a FAANG and there are pockets of interesting stuff (mainly the research orgs) but IMO the average SDE job is pretty boring/unsatisfying, its mostly just wiring services/libraries together, shuffling data around, and fiddling with infra/deployments.

The notion that all the smart people work for 5 companies seems...not all that smart.

> all of the smartest people I know

Is it your thought that the post and “I know” part translates to all smart people? Perhaps the original post was edited?

I could have alluded to it...but that just takes it in a "you live in a tiny bubble" direction which also isn't exactly flattering.

Don’t know many smart people. I’ve interacted with some, followed others, but admittedly I’m not sure where most of them work. Offhand one person I know works at some small noname company working in niche industry they enjoy. Not sure of much more detail than that. I’m familiar with the area of work of others, but am unaware of the professional status. Frankly I got the impression a few of them were either independent contractors who bounced around or otherwise not working traditional jobs.

The smartest people I know left tech.

No, this isn't sarcasm or a joke. I do wonder if there's some sort of inverse correlation between intelligence and ability to thrive under corporate bureaucracy.

It's less about intelligence I think and more about curiosity, autonomy, and mastery not being able to survive in said corporate bureaucracy. You either get wealthy or make do within your means and leave for industries, orgs, and teams that crush your soul less (or, hopefully yet rarely, bring you joy and meaningful work).

Some crabs find their way out of the pot, some don’t.

Tech's relentless pursuit of optimisation can certainly have that soul crushing effect. It's not easy to find a gig where your lane is not simply ticket in, pull request out. I loved programming but my last few jobs definitely have me thinking about life after IT.

Monetizing everything in the tech sector makes doing anything in the sphere a chore, and furthers the decline of innovation at the largest levels due to the incisiveness need to appease shareholders, or corporate suit jockeys.

Someone else touched it on it briefly, the smartest people in tech are usually in OpenSource. DEFCON comes to mind when I'm asked "whos the smartest people I know"

Did they leave only tech or the corporate world in general?

> A lot of smart people I know work a startups, but all of the smartest people I know work at FAANG/MAMAA

A lot of smart people I know work at FAANG/MAMAA, but many of the smartest people I know founded startups.

On the East Coast. None of them stayed in the Bay Area very long.

They work in VC, PE, or investment banking.

Surprisingly there are a lot of highly intelligent people in government roles who are not purely driven by money.

Either doing a graduate degree or quant funds

The smartest people I know, work for the federal government.

The smartest person I know personally works at Stripe...

Microsoft

Doctors

After my last bunch of medical issues, I lost confidence in this field almost entirely.

Doctors (or at least most of them) are not critical thinkers. They simply repeat the knowledge they have seen in textbooks or in other patients. As soon as what you have is out of the common path, you are on your own. I had to do my own research to figure out the cause of my symptoms and bring those to my doctors that agreed with my research.

It happens, I've seen a lot of doctors mess up. But they're still better equipped than you to discern medical fact from non fact during research. The sweet spot is a doctor that involves you in the decision making process, is transparent and intellectually honest. I've had doctors that admitted to me they didn't know what's wrong with me but gave me a list of probable options and a series of possible tests to undergo.

The pattern that seems to work is do your own research and bring the probable diagnostic to your doctor that can have a second look at them.

In my case, had I not do that my doctors (saw multiple) would never have diagnosed it. This was for a rare syndrome.

As someone with a wife in the business, I would taper your expectations. I don't doubt many are smart, but personality wise, they're incredibly lacking. I will say the majority of the doctors from other countries are shinning examples and don't get enough praise for their ability to act quickly, especially those who hail from countries that suffer turmoil regularly.